Some embodiments described herein relate generally to methods and apparatus for detecting signal degradation in an optical network. In particular, but not by way of limitation, some embodiments described herein relate to methods and apparatus for detecting a signal degradation using the pre-forward error correction bit error rate at an optical transponder.
With a growing demand of optical communication systems with high data rates capability, it is important to promptly detect and notify signal degradation and failures to satisfy the latency, reliability, and availability requirements of these optical communication systems, which include optical transponders and routers. When an optical transponder fails, known solutions, however, do not allow a router to be promptly notified by the optical transponder with which the router interfaces. As a result, the router is unable to initiate failover procedures promptly in the event of the failure of the optical transponder, which leads to loss of data traffic. Moreover, known solutions may include responding to failures (e.g., reroute data traffic) with a latency after failures occur. These known solutions, however, are typically unable to detect prognostic indicators of a failure, and thus, unable to implement failover procedures before the failure actually occurs.
Accordingly, a need exists for a fast method and apparatus to preventively detect a signal degradation in an optical communication system before a failure occurs, and promptly notify a router of the optical communication system of the failure such that the router initiates failover procedures to avoid or minimize traffic loss.